The General Elation

The centrist celebrations of Labour's landslide general election victory have quickly given way to crabby complaints that the strategic genius of Morgan McSweeney and Keir Starmer isn't being appreciated. This is because of "resentful Corbynistas" and battered Tories pointing out that Labour got half a million fewer votes than in 2019 and barely improved its vote share. One word that has been used a lot is "efficient" as Labour managed to convert its 34% share into 64% of MPs. There are obviously other terms you could use to decribe that outcome, such as disproportionate, but the choice of word tells us a lot about what commentators anticipate from the new government. There has been much talk of Labour being "under new management" and Keir Starmer personally promising competence and probity in public office; the one an obvious ideological rebuke to the left, the other a condemnation of the Tories' chaotic misrule. But no one seriously expects that a working majority of 181 will encourage Keir Starmer to release his inner socialist and drive radical reform. Thus we have the sight of a party celebrating that it no longer piles up "wasted votes" in urban seats giving every sign that it will waste the opportunity of a big Commons majority, just as Blair did in 1997 when the door to lasting constitutional reform was wide open. 

The Labour right's "power for a purpose" mantra exists solely to chastise the left. In office the party is invariably timid, particularly in respect of the constitution and foreign policy. 1945 wasn't even an exception to this rule: Attlee had no more interest in reforming the House of Lords than he did in pushing decolonisation. The urging of "boldness" ahead of the manifesto publication was largely a plea that Labour adopt something vaguely progressive that could be sold on the doorstep. It was about the vibe rather than the substance. Likewise, the early talk of priorities and the first hundred days has focused on fire-fighting rather than reform: stop Thames Water going bust, end the NHS strikes, stop more local councils going bust. The impression given is of a new management team parachuted in to save a failing business. There will be progressive gestures. The Rwanda scheme abandoned, the de facto ban on onshore wind farms rescinded, and various taskforces assembled to address planning regulations and the parlous state of the universities, but there's will be no questioning of the role of capital while the meta-narrative will be about the restoration of the state's authority.

For Starmer's enthusiastic backers in the media, such as Andrew Rawnsley, the election victory is a continuation of the Labour leader's efforts to "rebuild" the party after Corbyn and "its most abject defeat since 1935". The idea that Britain is a broken ruin is hyperbole but it does chime with voters' experience of crumbling public services and infrastructural neglect. The idea that the Labour Party was a ruin, given the huge increase in membership under Corbyn and the positivity of the 2017 election, is ridiculous, but the needs of the narrative demand that Starmer be framed as a fixer and restorer. The problem is that his "remarkable feat" in making Labour electable is mostly smoke and mirrors. Not only did it depend on the Conservative vote being torn in multiple directions by an electorate united in nothing beyond the conviction that the Tories should be booted out, it also required the connivance of the press as Starmer systematically misled the Labour membership, purged the left and lined the party up with the most conservative elements in society. The late endorsement by The Sun was confirmation of a deal sealed years ago.

The myth of 2019 will never die because it serves the narrative of how Starmer "rescued" Labour, but it will also enjoy a new lease of life as the challenges mount up for the government. As more and more people are disappointed, the Prime Minister will be able to say that it took 5 years to fix the party and it will take at least that to make inroads into the UK's myriad problems. That Labour secured over half a million more votes in 2019, and a percentage share only slightly worse than last week's, are not details that will change this narrative, and no centrist will thank you for noting how poorly 2024's performance compares to 2017's in terms of attracting voters. What matters is the win, even if we all know that the result was simply an extreme example of the old adage that it is governments that lose elections not oppositions that win them. The claim of efficiency does come with some caveats: that Labour has alienated the young and ethnic minorities, which it may come to regret, and that its vote in many of the consitituencies won from the Conservatives is fragile. With so many seats now classed as marginals, a Tory revival is not out of the question.

How the Tories might accomplish that is moot. The tale of the last 50 years is not just the general shift to the right on the political spectrum but the compression of the options. Reform are plain old reactionary conservatives, most of whom consider themselves to be Thatcherites. The Liberal Democrats are dominated by the neoliberal economic orthodoxies of the Orange Bookers, while their social liberalism is insipid. They will no doubt seek to challenge Labour's authoritarianism in office, but cooperation on areas such as health, education and welfare is likely. With Labour adopting the mantle of fiscal responsibility, there's no obvious space for the Tories to occupy. Once Brexit "got done", for good or ill, and once the pandemic brought home the folly of austerity, the party found itself without a clear proposition, hence it has spent the last few years thrashing about over emotive but marginal issues such as the Rwanda scheme, London's ULEZ and the fatuous "war on woke". In a political landscape dominated by conservative orthodoxy, Starmer correctly recognised that competence could be his USP, not least because the Tories had displayed serial incompetence in office since 2015. 

There was clearly little movement by voters between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, the latter's vote share barely changing, any more than there was movement from the latter to Labour. Ed Davey and his merry band were simply more efficient (that word again) in their targeting. In contrast, Reform came third in the popular vote, ahead of the Liberal Democrats, but their diffuse support meant that they won only 5 seats compared to the traditional third party's 72. The recovery of the Conservative Party electorally will require it to eat deeply into one or the other's voter base, so it faces a crucial choice. At this point we should remember that the party's secret weapon is not the loyalty often claimed for it but collective opportunism. In 2009 they managed to transform a banking crisis into a charge of fiscal irresponsibility against the last Labour government, paving the way for austerity and indirectly Brexit. Ten years later they exploited the Labour right's sabotage of its own party and the lingering leave-remain split to secure a further five years in power. Opportunism suggests either the absorption of Reform by adopting a fully reactionary programme, or coalition with the Liberal Democrats on a platform of rejoining the EU.

If the UK had a proportional electoral system then a split in the Conservative Party would be likely. But under first-past-the-post (FPTP) it must stick together and so it must choose one political direction or the other. Unlikely though it may seem, the greater opportunity lies towards the Liberal Democrats. Keir Starmer is sincere (for once) in saying that he cannot see the UK rejoining the EU in his lifetime. Though popular sentiment has steadily shifted to rejoining the Single Market it remains negative on the idea of adopting the euro (which would be a condition) and that's unlikely to change any time soon. Were Labour to back reaccession, it would probably lose a lot of seats in those areas that originally voted heavily for leave. As part of the project to establish Labour as the national party, Starmer appreciates that it must also remain the Brexit party, at least until death and demography change the electorate. Though the Liberal Democrats have managed to produce an efficient result at this election - 11% of seats on 12% of the vote - they also know that this will prove a historical curio unless they can significantly boost their vote share (half of what they got in 2010) next time. A merger with pro-EU Tories would consign Reform to the traditional disproportionate lot of the third party.

2024 may well go down in British political history as the oddest election of them all, and we can expect to hear a lot about the need for electoral reform over the coming weeks as a result. But its very oddity means that Labour will be unwilling to consider reform. This is not solely self-interest but an appreciation that the more fragmented landscape of a proportional system would not be in the interests of a faction, the party right, that has deliberately alienated swathes of the membership and made enemies of much of its own voter base. Starmer's "Stability is change" mantra should be clue enough that the project of restoring the state's authority after the disruptions of Brexit and Corbyn will not be sidetracked by constitutional reform, any more than UK foreign policy will suddenly discover an independence from Washington or a moral dimension. The size and fragility of Labour's Commons majority means that the next five years will see growing backbench anxiety as the government's popularity inevitably falls in the face of weak growth and painfully slow improvements in public services. With so many lobbyists elected, there are likely to be lobbying scandals. 

A couple of days before the vote, Polly Toynbee insisted that "If the result is grossly disproportionate, Labour would have a moral obligation to voters to bring in a fairer system: it couldn’t be called gerrymandering when Labour had benefited so much from first past the post." In other words, she thinks Starmer should be magnanimous in victory. Toynbee has always been stunningly naive about British politics since her days helping to found the SDP in the 1980s, but even she must appreciate that magnanimity isn't a word that appears in the lexicon of the Labour right. She continues, "Weak but long held-up reasons for opposing reform were burnt away in the turmoil of recent years. Who can defend first past the post as providing “stability” after the tragicomedy of five PMs in eight years, and scores of ministers whizzing through revolving doors?" Again, she misunderstands what Starmer means by stability: it isn't the "grown-ups" back in charge, it is rather an authoritarian government that will brook no dissent. And if Starmer ever countenanced a change to the electoral system, you can be pretty sure that the party right would dispose of him pronto. The rumour that they intend to change the party rulebook so that only MPs can elect the leader when in government isn't simply about denying the membership a say. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and the PLP isn't about to vote for PR.